Oh great. So now you've gone from accusing them of using CP to dodge taxes on their advertising revenue to accusing them of laundering charitable donations into their own pockets.
Do you have any evidence for any of this? Do you have any proof that the two of them are paying themselves wages as CP's "administrators"? Do you have any proof that they have extracted "expenses" from the pool of donations that were not actually expenses of the Child's Play charity, but rather expenses of Penny Arcade or simply profit-taking?
Because that all would have to be spelled out on their tax returns, and if those "expenses" weren't really expenses then they can't be claimed and the IRS would be on them like flies on shit. So you're not just accusing them of cynically taking advantage of the tax code, you're actually accusing them of being tax cheats. The law is very specific on what can actually be counted as charity and what can't.
You're a real piece of work, you know that? People are out there making a real difference in children's lives, and all you have is baseless accusations founded on cynicism. Cynicism for its own sake is wrong and stupid. And it also doesn't help anyone, unlike Child's Play.
Wow. It's hard to find the words. Yeah, there are reasons to be cynical about corporate charities, like how tobacco company Philip Morris spent tons more on advertising about how charitable it was than on actual charity...
Right, or a great example today I heard on the radio. KFC is trying to raise $8.5 million to donate to cancer research. They're doing this by selling pink buckets of chicken at something like $8/pop, and donating $0.50 of each. This is the typical cynical corporate method of charity contributions: Making their donation dependent on product sales, advertising this fact, and thus trying to directly leverage their "generosity" into increased product sales. I wouldn't be surprised if they expected the extra sales to completely offset the donation itself.
If, instead, KFC just donated $8.5mil directly, even wrote that off their taxes, and didn't spend millions advertising their generosity, that would be fine. Getting some PR benefit out of charity is okay with me.
But dude, you can't let that cynicism blind you to real charity. I don't think you have any idea how hard volunteers for Child's Play work every year.
Yeah, he obviously has no idea what Child's Play is all about. There are a million easier ways to get the same tax benefit.
I have heard nothing, not even a rumor, of any funds from PA revenues being somehow 'laundered' through CPC.
Well I don't know about that, but I have heard rumors of foul play at the CP auction.;)
You can only write off what you actually donate. So unless they're donating enough to make their net income zero, they're paying taxes on their advertising income.
The vast majority of money for Child's Play comes from donations, donations that go completely into the charity, and are completely unnecessary for your It's Just A Tax Shelter theory.
They've raised literally millions of dollars for sick kids to have games to play in the hospital.
You're full of shit and an asshole to boot for trying to tear down something as great as Child's Play.
Vertical axis turbines (which is what I think you're describing) aren't as efficient as horizontal axis turbines where every part of the blade on every part of the cycle experiences maximum lift from the wind.
The massive horizontal axis turbines that have a single support column with a rounded top instead of a scaffolding (like the Altamont Pass turbines, which encouraged raptors to nest on them causing much of the problem) are more than good enough with regard to bird strikes
Then some crazy scientist decided to disobey the Laws of Thermodynamics.
The pellets they are fusing are tiny. They contain a tiny amount of fusible fuel. It can't possibly just keep burning any more than a match can burn forever.
And don't stars when the collapse create black holes?
Only massive ones. Massive for stars. Again, tiny pellet is tiny.
I understood it as using 1M to gather up groups (unis and such) to gather together and use the joint gathered funding to build the place and get it running.
Pretty much the impression I had, though I ask "build what place"? From what they describe in the article, they can just rent some office space, or set up a few "temporary" office trailers around existing FAA offices if they don't have room. It sounds like gathering the research groups together is most of all the actual work they'll be doing, acting as a central hub for information, not a place where actual research is done. They'll also be discussing safety procedures and regulations with these groups and will ultimately decide what is licensed to launch or not, but the FAA already does that. Setting up a dedicated office for approving private space travel may, in one of those perverse turns of events in government, actually streamline things.
Setting aside the fallacy that we can ever be "Energy dependent" or stop consuming "foreign oil" if we want to remain a first world country,
The fallacy is that we can remain a "first world" country without reducing our oil consumption past the point where we can satisfy our needs domestically. The question isn't do we stop consuming foreign oil. The question is, do we do it deliberately before we are forced by the depletion of all sources including domestic, or do we neglect the problem until it's too late.
inefficient electricity production
Haha, no.
There's a lot of problems with wind power (mostly in the broad category of logistics), but efficiency isn't one of them. Modern windmills are very efficient.
LOL, it's the "all software has bugs, therefore all software is equally buggy" fallacy recycled for safety evaluation.
All jobs involve risk, therefore all jobs are equally risky! Every form of power generation involves the possibility that someone will die, ergo changing forms of power generation will not change the number of people who die.
Yeah.
By the way, unlike monolithic power generation, individual turbines in a wind farm can be shut down without significantly reducing the overall output. Shutting them down for maintenance is exactly what they're going to do.
Unfortunately, both kinds are affected by the solar wind (which is usually approx. directly away from the sun, but can vary wildly when it's distorted by magnetic fields. And which can't be tacked against, unless you charge your sails sufficiently with a charge opposite to that of the incoming wind...and maybe not then. (Even if this would work, it's impractical.)
Nonsense! Simply build a keel of conductive material on the spacecraft that will give the ship a preferred direction of motion through the Luminiferous Aether and you can tack 'upwind' as easily as you tack up a river!
I guess you didn't mean this, but just to avoid confusion. There is something called "solar wind", charged particles ejected from the sun, it has nothing to do with this sail. The sail uses light pressure, the pressure of light emitted by the sun.
I'm pretty sure it uses both, seeing as how both light and charged particles will impart momentum to the sail when they hit it. Ihe solar light pressure is larger, so it's accurate to say it's powered by light pressure. But the solar wind does have something to do with it.:)
And obviously the photovoltaic aspect is based solely on photons.:)
I'm not trying to say everything is realistic, but at least there is a vauge sense of realism.
Haha, no there isn't. How realistic that spiders carry gold coins and swords, animal skins instantly turn to leather when cut from the body, you can carry 100 gold bars around and be as encumbered as if you were carrying 100 flowers, and so on. You can rationalize the behavior of the random number generator, but that's not realism. But who cares? Game mechanics before realism. When realism gets in the way of the game, realism gets out of the way. They didn't make wolves sometimes not drop a liver because it's "realistic" that your Decaptitate attack damaged its liver. They did it to stretch out how long it takes to collect N wolf livers.
Yeah, because it's great when the main incentive is for everyone to play the same character. Who is going to play a buff/support class if your benefit from going about buffing everyone is zip. Or if you get "credit", then it invalidates your statement about design below.
I take it you're talking about this statement: "so hey let's assume they'll design it so that you get nothing if you try to heal but it isn't needed!" That was about how you were assuming it would be designed, because it produced a negative outcome, rather than assume they do something smart.
Similarly, there is no reason to assume that your reward scales directly with the amount of damage you do, ergo no reason to assume anyone would only focus on maximum damage classes and ignore support classes -- any more than they already do, simply because people like doing the most damage! It is trivial to think of ways to implement this mechanic so it doesn't encourage what you fear. But you choose to assume the opposite.
What I was getting at is you will have people chain healing the tank for the sole purpose of trying to get the heal to hit as soon as they lose health so they can be getting credit for it.
Yes that was perfectly clear. What I was getting at is that you're making a number of unsupported assumptions about what constitutes "seriously contributing", like that only effective healing counts and that you need enough of it that you'll have to continuously try to snipe heals in order to reach the threshold when not much healing is needed. You forgot to mention that under these bad assumptions, there are cases where no healer would get any credit at all!
Nice assumption, too bad the article completely contradicts you.
No, as with everything else you have assumed, it is possible to interpret it that way, but not necessarily the case. "Everyone gets rewarded" does not necessarily mean "every possible piece of loot is given to everyone". It could mean that each participant gets their own loot roll and thus different equipment, or any other number of possibilities before you even get to the concept that it may not apply unchanged for all encounters.
By consistently assuming the one possibility that would create the negative results you predict, you are simply begging the question.
Allowing griefers to play as outlaw characters at a certain cost (that cost being whatever it takes to make sure that it remains a minority activity, and ought to vary according to supply and demand) and providing incentives for law abiding players to hunt them down gives both parties what they want. The griefer gets to annoy people and gain a reputation as a badass. Everyone else gets to hunt him down for fun and money.
Yeah, they already tried that, it was called "UO", and it ultimately didn't work. Why not?
Because it totally fails to "give both parties what they want". Why?
Because one of the parties wants to not be bothered by griefers. They don't want to be ganked by griefers, then have to form a coalition to go hunt them down just so they can continue playing the game in peace for a few seconds before the griefers respawn, even if they do gain a reward in the process. People who don't want to be ganked want to be rewarded for doing things that have nothing to do with griefers.
After all what's a fantasy setting without brigands and sadists to provide some colour?
"Fun". "Not annoying". "The game I want to play, not the ones the sadists want me to be playing, which by definition of sadism would only be the game I wanted to play if I was a masochist, which I'm not". Etc.
You can nitpick over the implementation details in UO or other games that tried it. But this idea fundamentally misses the reason why people don't like unrestricted world PvP and thus completely fails to appeal to both sides.
So a snake is going to drop 20 snake eyes on death?
Sure. Why not? Realism? Yeah cus that's less realistic than a snake dropping 0 or 1 eyes, or wolves with no liver. Or a single eye taking up the same amount of space in your backpack as a 20 gold gold bars, or... Yeah. Who cares.
But wait, it's only if they "significantly" contribute- good luck with that. You will have people playing characters that can do the most damage. Or healers who just heal everyone who doesn't need it.. fighting for heals such that everyone just wastes mana.
Oh noes, people playing characters that deal the most damage! And the 'fighting for heals' only happens if you make several specific assumptions about what was meant by "seriously [the actual word used] contribute". Of course fighting for heals happens regardless when you have more healers than you need because otherwise they are just sitting there being bored. Hmm... the whole idea behind this idea is to make contributing to group efforts (without explicitly joining a group) serves a purpose, so hey let's assume they'll design it so that you get nothing if you try to heal but it isn't needed!
Loot does not make sense, and it was just lead to a world where everyone has everything.
Only if you assume it applies to all loot and not just crap like snake eyes that nobody is jealous of anyone for having, but rather simply gets pissed if someone else stymies their chance to get them and end the stupid quest. I highly doubt they meant that everyone who defeats a boss monster gets a copy of every piece of equipment the boss drops.
Certainly. I agree with the other post you made about how the ISS was anything but an ideal project partly due to being saddled with the role of make-work for the Shuttle. Yet we can't go back and fix that (or not build it at all), it is what it is, and it's a unique science platform. It wasn't that long ago that missing modules meant there was little room for science and a lot of the inhabitant's days revolved around operating the station. Now that it's near completion, and technology on the ground has progressed so much (like those Cube Lab things you mentioned), there's both space and motivation to increase the science workload by extending offers to the (scientific) public.
It's hard to see how this is a bad thing. Heck, sending open calls for research proposals that make use of NASA-operated scientific instruments, which started catching on with Hubble, has become standard practice almost. That the ISS is ready to be used the same way is kinda exciting. Unless nobody actually submits any proposals. I just don't think that's likely.
Does pursuit of happiness include an education? Millions of extremely hard working but uneducated people would suggest that this is the path to being tired and poor, not rich.
Sorry, you said that asking for suggestions on research to be done just emphasizes its uselessness. That's not a strawman, that's what you said. It's not my fault that same logic applies equally to things you like such as MRO or Hubble.
Let's not assume that manned and unmanned missions can do the same thing, because they can't. Manned missions can't visit Saturn or Mars yet for that matter. And there are plenty of experiments that are much more easily performed with human supervision than without, and with pre-existing infrastructure than without. ISS is already up there, and contains space-shuttle-payload size bays designed exclusively for research. It isn't useless, the space agencies involved are already performing experiments on it. Expanding the number of experiments done is expanding its usefulness, not admitting it isn't useful at all as you claimed.
Again, we're in agreement that robotic probes are cheaper and better for exploring the solar system and beyond. I disagree with your stance that the ISS is useless. And your statement that asking for research to be conducted on it demonstrates this uselessness is factually and logically wrong.
NASA emphasizes the utter uselessness of the ISS by asking people what interesting things can be done with it.
Yes, and the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is useless as demonstrated by NASA asking people what interesting things could be photographed with it. Manned stations, robotic probes, equally useless!
P.S. I agree, more robotic probes. But seriously, sending out a call for researchers to propose experiments is not an indication of uselessness.
What this means is that any such container ship would have to be Iranian flagged (to use my hypothetical)
Haha! What makes you think that?
and would have to military operated.
Yes, of course. But why would a military-operated vessel that is trying to pose as an inoffensive merchant vessel fly their own flag?!
Any ship that can carry a shipping container could carry one of these missile systems. That means the number of hulls that could potentially be a threat to our ships is vastly increased.
Even Iran isn't stupid enough to give these yahoos their top-grade stuff.
Um, yes, but the entire context here is Russia potentially selling these weapons to Iran. I don't quite get the "ally" comment in the summary, but Russia is willing to trade with Iran.
An Iranian-type asymmetric navy was exactly the kind simulated in the Millennium Challenge where most of a carrier group, carrier included, were sunk. Weapons like this feed directly into the kind of tactics used in that scenario.
Against whom? If Al-Queda let of a bomb in New York harbor who would you nuke? Saudi? Afghanistan?
I don't know the details, but I've heard from nuclear scientists that it is possible to trace the origin of the nuclear material in a bomb even after it has exploded. It's not as trivial as, say, identifying where an ICBM was launched from, but not impossible. So, you bomb whoever allowed the nuke to arrive in the hands of al Qaeda. There should be a strong incentive for everyone to make sure their nuclear stockpile is secure, and if one of their nukes goes missing to let the international community know right away.
As I probably don't need to say, this hardly seems foolproof. Which is why shipping container nukes are the big threat, and a missile defense shield is stupid. MAD is our missile defense shield. MAD is to a lesser extent a shipping container shield, but it's that avenue that needs additional attention. Not ICBMs.
They are a lot harder to sink than you might imagine. It's not that easy to sink a ship that displaces 100,000 tons, short of nuclear weapons.
A decent size explosion under the center of the keel and its own weight will crack it. A modest sized explosion on the flight deck and it becomes a 100,000 ton command center.
Sinking an air craft carrier isn't actually that hard in theory, and making it useless is even easier. That's why they're surrounded by an entire fleet of ships stuffed with weaponry and countermeasures, so it becomes rather hard to sink a carrier in practice.
However in a war game that took place in the Persian Gulf with a carrier group vs a vastly less sophisticated force of small boats and planes designed to be reminiscent of Iran most of the carrier group, including the carrier, were sunk.
Iran having access to a container-based weapon that feeds into the kind of asymmetric tactics used, and the Brass' seeming refusal to learn the lessons of that war game, makes me pretty nervous regarding our navy's chances at least in the opening round of a shooting war.
Don't look at the slide as a whole... just look for an entry on the slide that represents an action, and follow the arrows which show what the effects of that action are.
No, don't do that, because each line in and of itself is simplified, and doesn't tell you anything you shouldn't have already known if you weren't being overly simplistic yourself. As you say, it's obvious. So what's the point of looking at the obvious and simplistic as represented in such a tangled mess?
Look at the slide as a whole. What's the message? "The situation in Afghanistan is a network of interrelated feedback loops vastly too complicated to be conveyed in a single slide". That's the only real information this slide conveys.
I could actually see this slide being highly useful if displayed to the right people. People who are involved in policy but have too simple an idea of the war. "Oh good, I'm going to have the war explained in a powerpoint slide," they say, thinking of typical PP presentations they've seen. The bam, up pops that tangled mess. "Whoa, this is way more complicated than I thought!" And there you go. Message imparted.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh great. So now you've gone from accusing them of using CP to dodge taxes on their advertising revenue to accusing them of laundering charitable donations into their own pockets.
Do you have any evidence for any of this? Do you have any proof that the two of them are paying themselves wages as CP's "administrators"? Do you have any proof that they have extracted "expenses" from the pool of donations that were not actually expenses of the Child's Play charity, but rather expenses of Penny Arcade or simply profit-taking?
Because that all would have to be spelled out on their tax returns, and if those "expenses" weren't really expenses then they can't be claimed and the IRS would be on them like flies on shit. So you're not just accusing them of cynically taking advantage of the tax code, you're actually accusing them of being tax cheats. The law is very specific on what can actually be counted as charity and what can't.
You're a real piece of work, you know that? People are out there making a real difference in children's lives, and all you have is baseless accusations founded on cynicism. Cynicism for its own sake is wrong and stupid. And it also doesn't help anyone, unlike Child's Play.
Wow. It's hard to find the words. Yeah, there are reasons to be cynical about corporate charities, like how tobacco company Philip Morris spent tons more on advertising about how charitable it was than on actual charity...
Right, or a great example today I heard on the radio. KFC is trying to raise $8.5 million to donate to cancer research. They're doing this by selling pink buckets of chicken at something like $8/pop, and donating $0.50 of each. This is the typical cynical corporate method of charity contributions: Making their donation dependent on product sales, advertising this fact, and thus trying to directly leverage their "generosity" into increased product sales. I wouldn't be surprised if they expected the extra sales to completely offset the donation itself.
If, instead, KFC just donated $8.5mil directly, even wrote that off their taxes, and didn't spend millions advertising their generosity, that would be fine. Getting some PR benefit out of charity is okay with me.
But dude, you can't let that cynicism blind you to real charity. I don't think you have any idea how hard volunteers for Child's Play work every year.
Yeah, he obviously has no idea what Child's Play is all about. There are a million easier ways to get the same tax benefit.
I have heard nothing, not even a rumor, of any funds from PA revenues being somehow 'laundered' through CPC.
Well I don't know about that, but I have heard rumors of foul play at the CP auction. ;)
You can only write off what you actually donate. So unless they're donating enough to make their net income zero, they're paying taxes on their advertising income.
The vast majority of money for Child's Play comes from donations, donations that go completely into the charity, and are completely unnecessary for your It's Just A Tax Shelter theory.
They've raised literally millions of dollars for sick kids to have games to play in the hospital.
You're full of shit and an asshole to boot for trying to tear down something as great as Child's Play.
Vertical axis turbines (which is what I think you're describing) aren't as efficient as horizontal axis turbines where every part of the blade on every part of the cycle experiences maximum lift from the wind.
The massive horizontal axis turbines that have a single support column with a rounded top instead of a scaffolding (like the Altamont Pass turbines, which encouraged raptors to nest on them causing much of the problem) are more than good enough with regard to bird strikes
And if it doesn't?
Then some crazy scientist decided to disobey the Laws of Thermodynamics.
The pellets they are fusing are tiny. They contain a tiny amount of fusible fuel. It can't possibly just keep burning any more than a match can burn forever.
And don't stars when the collapse create black holes?
Only massive ones. Massive for stars. Again, tiny pellet is tiny.
I understood it as using 1M to gather up groups (unis and such) to gather together and use the joint gathered funding to build the place and get it running.
Pretty much the impression I had, though I ask "build what place"? From what they describe in the article, they can just rent some office space, or set up a few "temporary" office trailers around existing FAA offices if they don't have room. It sounds like gathering the research groups together is most of all the actual work they'll be doing, acting as a central hub for information, not a place where actual research is done. They'll also be discussing safety procedures and regulations with these groups and will ultimately decide what is licensed to launch or not, but the FAA already does that. Setting up a dedicated office for approving private space travel may, in one of those perverse turns of events in government, actually streamline things.
Setting aside the fallacy that we can ever be "Energy dependent" or stop consuming "foreign oil" if we want to remain a first world country,
The fallacy is that we can remain a "first world" country without reducing our oil consumption past the point where we can satisfy our needs domestically. The question isn't do we stop consuming foreign oil. The question is, do we do it deliberately before we are forced by the depletion of all sources including domestic, or do we neglect the problem until it's too late.
inefficient electricity production
Haha, no.
There's a lot of problems with wind power (mostly in the broad category of logistics), but efficiency isn't one of them. Modern windmills are very efficient.
LOL, it's the "all software has bugs, therefore all software is equally buggy" fallacy recycled for safety evaluation.
All jobs involve risk, therefore all jobs are equally risky! Every form of power generation involves the possibility that someone will die, ergo changing forms of power generation will not change the number of people who die.
Yeah.
By the way, unlike monolithic power generation, individual turbines in a wind farm can be shut down without significantly reducing the overall output. Shutting them down for maintenance is exactly what they're going to do.
You know, I'm thinking there just might be an additional problem or two with my "space keel" idea. :)
Unfortunately, both kinds are affected by the solar wind (which is usually approx. directly away from the sun, but can vary wildly when it's distorted by magnetic fields. And which can't be tacked against, unless you charge your sails sufficiently with a charge opposite to that of the incoming wind...and maybe not then. (Even if this would work, it's impractical.)
Nonsense! Simply build a keel of conductive material on the spacecraft that will give the ship a preferred direction of motion through the Luminiferous Aether and you can tack 'upwind' as easily as you tack up a river!
I guess you didn't mean this, but just to avoid confusion. There is something called "solar wind", charged particles ejected from the sun, it has nothing to do with this sail. The sail uses light pressure, the pressure of light emitted by the sun.
I'm pretty sure it uses both, seeing as how both light and charged particles will impart momentum to the sail when they hit it. Ihe solar light pressure is larger, so it's accurate to say it's powered by light pressure. But the solar wind does have something to do with it. :)
And obviously the photovoltaic aspect is based solely on photons. :)
I'm not trying to say everything is realistic, but at least there is a vauge sense of realism.
Haha, no there isn't. How realistic that spiders carry gold coins and swords, animal skins instantly turn to leather when cut from the body, you can carry 100 gold bars around and be as encumbered as if you were carrying 100 flowers, and so on. You can rationalize the behavior of the random number generator, but that's not realism. But who cares? Game mechanics before realism. When realism gets in the way of the game, realism gets out of the way. They didn't make wolves sometimes not drop a liver because it's "realistic" that your Decaptitate attack damaged its liver. They did it to stretch out how long it takes to collect N wolf livers.
Yeah, because it's great when the main incentive is for everyone to play the same character. Who is going to play a buff/support class if your benefit from going about buffing everyone is zip. Or if you get "credit", then it invalidates your statement about design below.
I take it you're talking about this statement: "so hey let's assume they'll design it so that you get nothing if you try to heal but it isn't needed!" That was about how you were assuming it would be designed, because it produced a negative outcome, rather than assume they do something smart.
Similarly, there is no reason to assume that your reward scales directly with the amount of damage you do, ergo no reason to assume anyone would only focus on maximum damage classes and ignore support classes -- any more than they already do, simply because people like doing the most damage! It is trivial to think of ways to implement this mechanic so it doesn't encourage what you fear. But you choose to assume the opposite.
What I was getting at is you will have people chain healing the tank for the sole purpose of trying to get the heal to hit as soon as they lose health so they can be getting credit for it.
Yes that was perfectly clear. What I was getting at is that you're making a number of unsupported assumptions about what constitutes "seriously contributing", like that only effective healing counts and that you need enough of it that you'll have to continuously try to snipe heals in order to reach the threshold when not much healing is needed. You forgot to mention that under these bad assumptions, there are cases where no healer would get any credit at all!
Nice assumption, too bad the article completely contradicts you.
No, as with everything else you have assumed, it is possible to interpret it that way, but not necessarily the case. "Everyone gets rewarded" does not necessarily mean "every possible piece of loot is given to everyone". It could mean that each participant gets their own loot roll and thus different equipment, or any other number of possibilities before you even get to the concept that it may not apply unchanged for all encounters.
By consistently assuming the one possibility that would create the negative results you predict, you are simply begging the question.
What are these pilots supposed to do, stare at the unchanging instruments for hours until their eyes glaze over and they pass out?
Sexual experimentation.
Allowing griefers to play as outlaw characters at a certain cost (that cost being whatever it takes to make sure that it remains a minority activity, and ought to vary according to supply and demand) and providing incentives for law abiding players to hunt them down gives both parties what they want. The griefer gets to annoy people and gain a reputation as a badass. Everyone else gets to hunt him down for fun and money.
Yeah, they already tried that, it was called "UO", and it ultimately didn't work. Why not?
Because it totally fails to "give both parties what they want". Why?
Because one of the parties wants to not be bothered by griefers. They don't want to be ganked by griefers, then have to form a coalition to go hunt them down just so they can continue playing the game in peace for a few seconds before the griefers respawn, even if they do gain a reward in the process. People who don't want to be ganked want to be rewarded for doing things that have nothing to do with griefers.
After all what's a fantasy setting without brigands and sadists to provide some colour?
"Fun". "Not annoying". "The game I want to play, not the ones the sadists want me to be playing, which by definition of sadism would only be the game I wanted to play if I was a masochist, which I'm not". Etc.
You can nitpick over the implementation details in UO or other games that tried it. But this idea fundamentally misses the reason why people don't like unrestricted world PvP and thus completely fails to appeal to both sides.
So a snake is going to drop 20 snake eyes on death?
Sure. Why not? Realism? Yeah cus that's less realistic than a snake dropping 0 or 1 eyes, or wolves with no liver. Or a single eye taking up the same amount of space in your backpack as a 20 gold gold bars, or... Yeah. Who cares.
But wait, it's only if they "significantly" contribute- good luck with that. You will have people playing characters that can do the most damage. Or healers who just heal everyone who doesn't need it.. fighting for heals such that everyone just wastes mana.
Oh noes, people playing characters that deal the most damage! And the 'fighting for heals' only happens if you make several specific assumptions about what was meant by "seriously [the actual word used] contribute". Of course fighting for heals happens regardless when you have more healers than you need because otherwise they are just sitting there being bored. Hmm... the whole idea behind this idea is to make contributing to group efforts (without explicitly joining a group) serves a purpose, so hey let's assume they'll design it so that you get nothing if you try to heal but it isn't needed!
Loot does not make sense, and it was just lead to a world where everyone has everything.
Only if you assume it applies to all loot and not just crap like snake eyes that nobody is jealous of anyone for having, but rather simply gets pissed if someone else stymies their chance to get them and end the stupid quest. I highly doubt they meant that everyone who defeats a boss monster gets a copy of every piece of equipment the boss drops.
Hehe.
Lisa, in this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!
Perhaps it's also a nice bonus of progress?
Certainly. I agree with the other post you made about how the ISS was anything but an ideal project partly due to being saddled with the role of make-work for the Shuttle. Yet we can't go back and fix that (or not build it at all), it is what it is, and it's a unique science platform. It wasn't that long ago that missing modules meant there was little room for science and a lot of the inhabitant's days revolved around operating the station. Now that it's near completion, and technology on the ground has progressed so much (like those Cube Lab things you mentioned), there's both space and motivation to increase the science workload by extending offers to the (scientific) public.
It's hard to see how this is a bad thing. Heck, sending open calls for research proposals that make use of NASA-operated scientific instruments, which started catching on with Hubble, has become standard practice almost. That the ISS is ready to be used the same way is kinda exciting. Unless nobody actually submits any proposals. I just don't think that's likely.
Does pursuit of happiness include an education? Millions of extremely hard working but uneducated people would suggest that this is the path to being tired and poor, not rich.
Sorry, you said that asking for suggestions on research to be done just emphasizes its uselessness. That's not a strawman, that's what you said. It's not my fault that same logic applies equally to things you like such as MRO or Hubble.
Let's not assume that manned and unmanned missions can do the same thing, because they can't. Manned missions can't visit Saturn or Mars yet for that matter. And there are plenty of experiments that are much more easily performed with human supervision than without, and with pre-existing infrastructure than without. ISS is already up there, and contains space-shuttle-payload size bays designed exclusively for research. It isn't useless, the space agencies involved are already performing experiments on it. Expanding the number of experiments done is expanding its usefulness, not admitting it isn't useful at all as you claimed.
Again, we're in agreement that robotic probes are cheaper and better for exploring the solar system and beyond. I disagree with your stance that the ISS is useless. And your statement that asking for research to be conducted on it demonstrates this uselessness is factually and logically wrong.
NASA emphasizes the utter uselessness of the ISS by asking people what interesting things can be done with it.
Yes, and the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is useless as demonstrated by NASA asking people what interesting things could be photographed with it. Manned stations, robotic probes, equally useless!
P.S. I agree, more robotic probes. But seriously, sending out a call for researchers to propose experiments is not an indication of uselessness.
What this means is that any such container ship would have to be Iranian flagged (to use my hypothetical)
Haha! What makes you think that?
and would have to military operated.
Yes, of course. But why would a military-operated vessel that is trying to pose as an inoffensive merchant vessel fly their own flag?!
Any ship that can carry a shipping container could carry one of these missile systems. That means the number of hulls that could potentially be a threat to our ships is vastly increased.
Even Iran isn't stupid enough to give these yahoos their top-grade stuff.
Um, yes, but the entire context here is Russia potentially selling these weapons to Iran. I don't quite get the "ally" comment in the summary, but Russia is willing to trade with Iran.
An Iranian-type asymmetric navy was exactly the kind simulated in the Millennium Challenge where most of a carrier group, carrier included, were sunk. Weapons like this feed directly into the kind of tactics used in that scenario.
Against whom? If Al-Queda let of a bomb in New York harbor who would you nuke? Saudi? Afghanistan?
I don't know the details, but I've heard from nuclear scientists that it is possible to trace the origin of the nuclear material in a bomb even after it has exploded. It's not as trivial as, say, identifying where an ICBM was launched from, but not impossible. So, you bomb whoever allowed the nuke to arrive in the hands of al Qaeda. There should be a strong incentive for everyone to make sure their nuclear stockpile is secure, and if one of their nukes goes missing to let the international community know right away.
As I probably don't need to say, this hardly seems foolproof. Which is why shipping container nukes are the big threat, and a missile defense shield is stupid. MAD is our missile defense shield. MAD is to a lesser extent a shipping container shield, but it's that avenue that needs additional attention. Not ICBMs.
They are a lot harder to sink than you might imagine. It's not that easy to sink a ship that displaces 100,000 tons, short of nuclear weapons.
A decent size explosion under the center of the keel and its own weight will crack it. A modest sized explosion on the flight deck and it becomes a 100,000 ton command center.
Sinking an air craft carrier isn't actually that hard in theory, and making it useless is even easier. That's why they're surrounded by an entire fleet of ships stuffed with weaponry and countermeasures, so it becomes rather hard to sink a carrier in practice.
However in a war game that took place in the Persian Gulf with a carrier group vs a vastly less sophisticated force of small boats and planes designed to be reminiscent of Iran most of the carrier group, including the carrier, were sunk.
Iran having access to a container-based weapon that feeds into the kind of asymmetric tactics used, and the Brass' seeming refusal to learn the lessons of that war game, makes me pretty nervous regarding our navy's chances at least in the opening round of a shooting war.
Don't look at the slide as a whole... just look for an entry on the slide that represents an action, and follow the arrows which show what the effects of that action are.
No, don't do that, because each line in and of itself is simplified, and doesn't tell you anything you shouldn't have already known if you weren't being overly simplistic yourself. As you say, it's obvious. So what's the point of looking at the obvious and simplistic as represented in such a tangled mess?
Look at the slide as a whole. What's the message? "The situation in Afghanistan is a network of interrelated feedback loops vastly too complicated to be conveyed in a single slide". That's the only real information this slide conveys.
I could actually see this slide being highly useful if displayed to the right people. People who are involved in policy but have too simple an idea of the war. "Oh good, I'm going to have the war explained in a powerpoint slide," they say, thinking of typical PP presentations they've seen. The bam, up pops that tangled mess. "Whoa, this is way more complicated than I thought!" And there you go. Message imparted.